Entangled Life

If the alterity of plant life is daunting, it can be helpful to frame general questions about cognition, community, agency, and subjectivity by beginning with the state of studying other animals. However, it is critical that we do not flatten all forms of life into the category of mammalian experiences, but rather, that we consider access to new data as a means of better understanding the field of consciousness studies as well as how scholars and communities are approaching (and have historically approached) other minds. We began with readings that would help us reconsider how we might think about ourselves amongst other species.

In “Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial: Consistency in Our Thinking about Humans and Other Animals,” renowned primatologist Frans de Waal addresses the scientific sin of anthropomorphism and the validity of that criticism regularly leveled in animal studies. He argues that while we should be mindful of the specificities of species and avoid anthropocentrism, the fear of acknowledging similarities between evolutionarily near relations manifests instead as anthropodenial, defined as “blindness to the human-like characteristics of animals or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves.” De Waal points out that “the modeling of animal behavior on our own experiences is more successful than predictions based on existing formal theories,” as outdated paradigms seeped in human exceptionalism can lead us to incorrect assumptions and underdeveloped conclusions, such as an ethological misinterpretation of the behaviors of other species. That being said, it would be equally unfair to assume that because other species exhibit familiar behaviors, they are experiencing the world in a specifically human way. Rather, research involving nonhumans “should never accept explanations without critical reflection,” starting with the researcher’s own philosophical positioning. For there is “nothing wrong with widening the workspace of permissible hypotheses while retaining high standards of replicability and scientific scrutiny” by privileging informed intention and an open mind over stale biases.⁴

In our second article, “Un-tabooing Empathy: The Benefits of Empathetic Science with Nonhuman Research Participants,” researchers specializing in various areas in the natural sciences contend that contemporary methods of biological and ethological research are laboring under a false objectivity—the belief that science is impartial and value-free—rather than acknowledging that all methodologies are rooted in ontological dispositions. Walking into a lab does not mean that researchers suddenly become unmoored from the philosophies and belief systems that have informed and formed their dispositions towards their work. We bring our training, our upbringing, our cosmologies, our biases with us, and when we forget that those paradigms influence the ways in which we approach our work, our results risk being skewed. Drawing on decades of ecofeminist scholarship, the authors advocate that relationships are the default state of existence, explaining that “empathy could help bring animal subjective experiences into the realm of investigative inquiry, widening scientists’ scope and uncovering alternative or additional explanations for phenomena of interest.”⁵ Like de Waal, these authors aim to shift the initial set of assumptions, encouraging researchers to adjust the methodologies through which we gather and process data for peer review.

Both of these readings stress the acknowledgment and subsequent deconstruction of a cognitive dissonance ironically prevalent in the study of nonhumans—one that assumes a species hierarchy, rather than a field of similarities and differences. Researchers utilize other species as proxies for human research and yet deny a comparable interiority, one that oddly contradicts evolutionary parsimony by portraying humans as exceptional. However, neither article sheds much light on why this incongruity exists. For example, de Waal weaves an exploration of the etymological history of the term “anthropomorphism” throughout his piece, but he never quite names why an anxiety around ascribing human traits to gods in ancient Greece would be so pervasive today.

This brings us to our final article, Eduado Viveiro de Castro’s “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” a widely noted ethnographic exploration detailing the “highly transformational world” of Indigenous Ameridian communities whose engagement with other species he categorizes as a form of perspectivism, a term coined by German philosopher Gustav Teichmüller in the mid-nineteenth century. In Viveiro de Castro’s scholarship, the concept encompasses an understanding that the world is populated with perceptions of “reality from distinct points of view” supported by “corporeal diversity.” Other-than-humans are infused with spirit, archetypically linked to mythologies where “the original common condition of both humans and animals is not animality but rather humanity.” He writes, that “the way humans perceive animals and other subjectivities that inhabit the world—gods, spirits, the dead, inhabitants of other cosmic levels, meteorological phenomena, plants, occasionally even objects and artefacts—differs profoundly from the way in which these beings see humans and see themselves,” and yet the same goes for animals within Amerindian perspectivism. Essentially, “animals are people, or see themselves as persons,” though here he clarifies that “to see” refers “to percepts and not analogically to concepts.” This specific cosmology is geographically and culturally situated in Amazonian cosmologies in Brazil, not open to universal appropriation; still, perspectivism as an epistemological approach is useful in reflecting on other ideological spaces, especially as definitions like Philippe Descola’s categories of totemism, animism, and naturalism are deconstructed.⁶

Although Viveiros de Castro’s piece was published in 1998, I return to it regularly in my work, and, like a forest, its complexity never ceases to shift some new insight into the light. He explains how entanglement between hunting and spiritual guidance is central to Amerindian perspectivism, as hunting maintains “relations between humans and the spiritual component of the extra-humans.”⁷ This brought up a series of complex questions in our reading group, especially around the possibility of disentangling the experience of tracking another being with the aim of killing that being—not unlike the act of identifying plants by gathering them. In the Araweté and Xikrin (Kayapó) communities that Viveiros de Castro is analyzing, there is a difference in “symbolic importance” between plants and animals with regard to the hunt, but that does not necessarily mean that other cultures would see it that way.⁸ Labeling the hunt as a space for exploring relationality is not only provoking in the context of nonhuman ethics, it additionally intersects with the popularity of books and articles on plant consciousness—especially pieces that utilize typically human diction to describe plant behavior, such as the article “This Is What It Sounds Like When Plants Cry.”⁹ Jokes float around the internet about how vegans will adjust to all this new data on plant consciousness. As an herbalist, and a person engaging critically and eagerly with new ecological data, this is a question I regularly field—how do I gather ethically? What is generative relationality in the process of foraging, if the endgame is cutting the plant’s stem or digging up the roots? If I love my friend the maple tree, how can I repeatedly tap that tree for sap? We do not have space here for the sort of discussion of ritual theory, sacrifice, and the sacrality of decomposition, compost, and digestion that such questions might prompt. Instead, let’s turn to books that can help guide us through these entangled root systems.

Finding the Mother Tree

Suzanne Simard’s scientific papers have been actively reshaping the way forestry is approaching the timber industry since she stepped into the field; however, it is her memoir, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, that has created cultural waves. Through extensive experiments, typically with carbon isotopes, root grafts, and remote sensing, Simard and her team have shown that forests are connected through underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi. These expansive, vital systems channel nutrients, carbon, and information between trees, even supporting interspecies cooperation between birch trees and douglas firs, who trade off sugars depending on seasonal needs. She also argues for the existence of so-called mother trees—older, established matriarchs critical to the health and functioning of a forest. These parental plants redistribute nutrients and water, provide protection to younglings struggling with the elements, act as a communication hub, pass on beneficial fungal partners, and even seem to prioritize genetic relatives.¹⁰

The epiphanies in Simard’s research stem directly from her personal life, which itself serves as a manual for relating to the more-than-human world. The book is as much about her groundbreaking research as it is about her life—the adversity she faced not only as a woman in forestry, but as a mother with radical ideas who advocated for relationship-based science while she navigated her family’s history in the Pacific Northwest, the complexities of marriage, raising children, her battle with cancer, and more. Her revelations about the tragedies and joys in her day-to-day life are as interwoven with the forest as her root grafts. It is a constant exchange, entirely enmeshed, just like the mycelia she studies.

It is exactly this entanglement of language and personhood that seems to alarm other scientists, especially mycologists. In fact, the recent rebuttal in the New York Times of Simard and her colleagues can be boiled down to anxieties over anthropomorphic diction; they take issue with her word associations, more so than her actual science—particularly the use of the label “mother.”¹¹ Ironically, contemporary science has no difficulty utilizing the metaphor of machines for living beings, especially for plants, but “mother” seems to be unacceptable. In response, I’ll summarize Professor Stang as he puzzled out this contradiction, observing that we look to nature for inspiration and awe, then mimic it, then look back at that same source of naturally occurring wonder and label it as no more powerful or capable than our own machines. Considering our opening articles, I would ask: What is at stake in using the language of motherhood and caretaking to refer to interplant relationships? If we prioritize biological integrity while discussing interconnectedness in the forest, does that make the term “mother” any less valid than machine? What are the philosophical dispositions underpinning that anxiety?

Thus Spoke the Plant

Over the past decade, evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano has risen to prominence as a leading voice in the effort to dismantle humancentric conceptions of communication, community, and learning, especially in science. In 2014, Oecologia published her experiments with Mimosa pudica, which demonstrated that “the defensive leaf-folding behaviour” the plant exhibited responded to “clear habituation, suggesting some elementary form of learning”—indicating a form of memory.¹² Her work since then has promoted the “de-objectification of plants and the recognition of their subjectivity and inherent worth and dignity,” which she hopes will succeed in awakening “a sense of ecological intimacy and kinship with these nonhuman living others and, thus, promoting human care for nature.”¹³

Like Simard, Gagliano’s vocabulary is a stumbling block for many of her academic peers. A New York Times interview explains that her framing of the data didn’t help: “She insists that she doesn’t use metaphors in her work, and that ‘learning’ is the best description we have for what took place, even if we don’t know how the plants are doing it.”¹⁴ However, her framing is what makes her work so compelling and pioneering. Gagliano’s writing is an ode to fervent commitment, abundant with love for her plant friends. This deep affection made our reading group wonder what might have led to Gagliano achieving results that haven’t been replicated by other scientists. How might her ontological assumptions differ from those of her colleagues, and why is that important? Recent research has shown that animals adjust their behavior in laboratory settings, depending on their relationship with their handlers¹⁵ therefore, is it possible that a plant might respond to a familiar handler similarly?

While Gagliano’s memoir Thus Spoke the Plant provides a compelling portrait of interspecies friendship and a fascinating look at the relationality behind her research, at times she takes on a spiritually authoritative tone, especially when putting the communications of plants into language, which risks a problematic use of power—one particularly noticeable to a religious studies community. For example, she presents the word “Oryngham” as the word for “thank you” in plant language, but there is no mention whether this term is situated in a geographically located human cultural paradigm or whether it required translation. However, its utterance requires human faculties of writing or speech to express, rather than—as one might expect from a non-verbal corporeality, perhaps—a feeling, an image, or some other somatic semiotic, so the reader is left wondering if this is meant to be a universal tongue or part of a private language.¹⁶ Whose voice is this? Who is this language for?

Furthermore, the book’s focus on entheogenic plants as her source of inspiration and prerogative raises familiar questions around appropriation, colonization, and extractionist pop-spirituality. While I do not think that Gagliano intends to intersect with those issues—nor do I think her relationship with her vegetal friends is reflective of the reductionism present in those frameworks—it is inevitable that a book that heavily features consciousness-altering plants must contend with our current cultural controversies. We are in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance, a “revived research interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs with expected FDA approvals for treatment of various conditions.”¹⁷ And yet, Indigenous voices, often those from the communities who are the traditional caretakers and partners of these plants, are not privileged in mainstream clinical discussions. Concurrently, we see plants like White Sage, sacred to the Chumash, the Cahuilla, and other Native communities in Southern California, or Copal, sacred to Nahuatl-speaking communities, commercialized and sold in airtight plastic at Whole Foods and other retailers as energetic brooms, demonstrating a willful neglect of ancestral and land relationships. Entheogens and other sacred plants are often characterized as a panacea for mental health issues, but this is certainly not a universal opinion among communities who work with plant medicines. This left our reading group to wonder whether, if we are to take the subjectivity of plants seriously, it is productive, or even appropriate, for plant medicine practitioners to reduce plant voices into a monoculture, reiterating the same, often greenwashed, message.

Therefore, I would instead suggest diving into Gagliano’s papers, beginning with “Breaking the Silence,” which considers language and meaning making in plantlife, and “The Mind of Plants: Thinking the Unthinkable,” which explores associative learning and decision making. I would then turn to “Plants Are Intelligent, Here’s How,” which argues for adaptability and individual variation, and “Experience Teaches Plants to Learn Faster and Forget Slower in Environments Where It Matters,” which presents her data on long-lasting behavioral changes and habituation in the Mimosa pudica.¹⁸ While some of her experiments have yet to be replicated, these pieces provide a rich and generative space to consider the effects of intention and relationality on experimental design.

While Simard and Gagliano guide their readers through their own entangled lives, Merlin Sheldrake ushers his audience through many lives. He writes as fungi might, presenting sprawling ideas and interwoven anecdotes, yet with tight, efficient sentences that pack a punch. He plays with language the way a forest plays with time; metaphors and stories thrive and feed off one another, then decay all in the span of a paragraph, only to pop up again a few pages later. Entangled Life evokes wonder, inviting questions and uprooting assumptions without being prescriptive or definitively conclusive.

The book somehow covers everything from fungi as bioremediators, to complex decision making displayed in experiments with mycelia, to co-partnerships with humans resulting in innovations such as antibiotics, to beautiful entheogenic explorations on retraining human neural networks to the fungal superpower of decomposition. Sheldrake’s indeterminacy contributes to his presentation of the complexity of interdependence; there is no clear and definitive predator/prey or parasite/host in many of the relationships he presents, whether with other fungi or other species, though Cordyceps are perhaps an obvious exception, as they invade the bodies of insects. Partnership has complex boundaries, and Sheldrake’s writing style echoes this expansiveness and specificity.

The Life of Plants

As you might expect, mycorrhizal metabolisms and reproductive habits do not cleanly fit within mainstream American post-Protestant morals or normative rules of cooperation. Even the critical fungal role of “environmental cleanup” relies on digestion, raising questions around the definition of mutually beneficial engagement. The infamous “wood wide web” concept, Sheldrake explains, is “far more about the movement of resources—whether energy-rich carbon compounds, nutrients,” water, or even bacteria— than simply the sharing of information, even if “plant communication through fungal networks is one of the compelling aspects of mycorrhizal behavior.”¹⁹ So, this book prompts the question, who is living off whom? The answer seems to be, everyone is living off everyone.

As science reckons with the evolutionary validity of species hierarchies and rethinks the demarcations of cognition, new data will invariably continue to trouble many ontological dispositions on ethical engagement.²⁰ This is particularly poignant in a religious studies sphere, where the merits of pluralism have already been extensively debated and discomfort with differing ideologies is considered inevitable. Entanglement is messy, and who in the academy wades more regularly into murky waters than those who study religion?

Emanuele Coccia’s Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture is a philosophical meditation on plants as cosmogonic beings—the ultimate worldbuilders. Although this short text includes some history and natural science, Coccia’s poetic arguments are more of a thought-project on existence than a biological analysis. He writes of the world as an immersion into a “universe without things, an enormous field of events of varying intensity,” in which “thinking and acting, working and breathing, moving, creating, feeling would be inseparable, because an immersed being has a relationship with the world that is not modeled on the relationship that a subject has with an object. . . . [So,] there is no material distinction between us and the rest of the world.”

This is deeper than simply interdependence; we are not only entirely reliant upon the beings in this world, we are those beings, for “the air we breathe is not a purely geological or mineral reality—it is not just out there, it is not, as such, an effect of the earth—but rather the breath of other living things. It is the byproduct of the lives of others.” He suggests that the term “Anthropocene” robs us of that awareness, making “the human being an extranatural cause” rather than a being amongst beings.²¹ This raises questions of belonging and purpose, forcing us again to reconsider the ways in which our cosmologies may reify human exceptionalism, which, in turn, affects research methodologies. If whales stopped acting like whales, the world as we know it would end because of the atmosphere’s reliance on the stability of their carbon capture. If bees stopped being bees, our food systems would fail. What about us?²²

While I felt completely swept into the flow of immersion, Coccia’s closing chapters fixate on the preeminence of sex and reproduction, effectively positioning procreation as the ultimate aim of all life. Having spent a great deal of time around monastics, and myself a monastic-curious person, I struggled with what felt like an unsatisfying conclusion to a rumination on mixture. One of our reading group members, ecophilosopher David Abram, offered reframing this as sensuality rather than sexuality—or, perhaps, connection instead of intercourse.

Our final text is an introspective on traditional pedagogy. Michael Marder’s The Philosopher’s Plant unearths a history of philosophical engagement with our vegetal kin, spanning Plato and his plane tree through Heidegger and his apple tree. Marder chooses quintessentially Western thinkers as his conduit to deconstruct plant-blindness in the academy, guiding his readers through complex relationships that highlight the pronounced presence of plants in the lives of major Western philosophical thinkers. For example, he digs into the irony of Kant’s fixation on tulips as an aesthetic ideal, explaining that “while the material facets of human existence are not, in Kant’s eyes, worthy of respect, even less so are nonhuman animals and plants that do not have a share in the rationality of transcendental subjects,” and yet, the philosopher cannot escape his love for them.²³ These ever-present green beings trouble the notion of “lesser” species—that is to say, that members of the Plantae family are purely aesthetic or mechanistic objects, as so often purported to be in theoretical discourse. They inspire us, heal us, feed us, hold us, terrify us, their movements mystify us, they ride the edges of definitions, and so, their role cannot be relegated to ornamental.

The Philosopher’s Plant

One might wonder why Marder opted for Western philosophy as the vehicle for probing plants—a branch of knowledge production that has traditionally only prioritized human life. In answer to this, I would suggest thinking of this text as a project in decomposition, reminding those of us who still think that religion, politics, ethics, and other branches of the social sciences are resolutely only reflective of our own species; this is a pursuit of composting a humancentric epistemology by challenging the relationships of those very figures whose writing upholds a generally anthropocentric worldview. This is an act of rewilding.

Marder’s methodology touches on my work as a scholar. At the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality’s inaugural conference on ecological spiritualities at Harvard in 2022, I presented a paper on plant personhood in relation to the study of Western esotericism, where alternative cosmologies and European Earth-based religions find an academic home. However, discussions on plant personhood are curiously absent from much of the field’s foundational works. I argued that by looking at the diction in textual material from Northern Europe, including incantation collections, folklore, and gardening literature, we can find acknowledgments of agency in plant life, brimming with intersubjectivity, reciprocity, and deep love for our vegetal kin. Just as the budding field of plant neurobiology “aims to unearth the way plants perceive and act purposefully,” it is my hope that, with the help of authors like Marder, those of us who work in the social sciences can concurrently dig up, honor, and recenter the role of relational engagement with other-than-humans in prevailing pedagogical timelines, and thereby remind the academy that even if industrialized cultures have been plant-blind, plants have always been present and active participants in our worldbuilding.²⁴

As our authors have shown us, much of this work is deeply personal, entangled with our understanding of ourselves as a species among species, as well as with our relationship to cyclical nature of life into death, death into life, and there is grief in this reckoning. A few years ago, without being informed, my memory tree was felled during a construction project. Even his stump was removed. It is the kind of heartbreak that brings me to collapse in on myself. It also felt indicative of the overarching disconnection with our abundant planet, the cognitive dissonance that all of these authors pinpointed: that in today’s dominant epistemologies, humans do not feel ourselves as interconnected, and so, we move throughout the world as if we are not, thoughtlessly ignoring the minds and dignity of others, willfully dismissing relationality.

However, just as I have found comradery through witnessing familiar connections in the interspecies experiences of other humans, I have learned that I am not alone in mourning the loss of certain individuals who happen to be trees.²⁵ I think engagement that centers reciprocity and includes ritual around death is part of what plants and fungi have to teach us, and I think that might be why it is so hard to acknowledge them. But that does not mean it is not worth every drop of effort. Leaning into the alterity of plants does not necessarily mean you need to dramatically emulate Sheldrake by inoculating a copy of his book on fungi with oyster mushrooms and then feasting on them;²⁶ it could be as simple as considering companion planting in your garden, beginning to identify the shrubs lining your office building, or advocating to your regional municipality to increase no-mow zones and support biodiversity. It could even be as simple a practice as designating time each day to sit with your favorite maple tree.